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#1342360 - 05/03/12 02:45 PM
Re: Occupy May Day
[Re: Chicago Jesus]
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Ayuveda
Senior Member
Registered: 04/05/10
Posts: 6367
Loc: Imagine
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This isn't going away.
Converge for Justice: Occupy Wall Street South - Bank of America Call to Action!
May 3, 2012
OccupyWallSt
Converge for Justice
Occupy Wall Street, South
Break Up BOA’s Business as Usual!
May 6-9, Charlotte, NC
On May 6-9 people from across the country and world will be converging in Charlotte, NC, home of Bank of America’s Headquarters and their annual Shareholder meeting, to demand an end to their practices that are bankrupting our economy and wrecking our climate.
Homeowners, students, immigrants, environmentalists, workers, women’s groups, peace activists and more will be in Charlotte, bringing their stories, hearts and communities to the fight against Bank of America and the economic inequality, racial injustice and environmental destruction they have wrought.
Bank of America is:
Number 1 forecloser of homes in the US,
Number 1 funder of the US coal industry,
Job killer by letting go of nearly 100,000 workers over the past several years,
Bonus Buster paying its top five executives over $500 million in bonuses,
Saddling students with a lifetime of debt, and
Financing the war machine.
Bank of America, and its profits-over-people-and-planet business model, is drowning our democracy through huge financial contributions to lobbyists that are serving the interests of the 1% and are participating in corporate-funded groups like American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Financial Services Roundtable.
As a global community united for real economic and racial justice, it is time that BoA is held accountable, invest in public needs and services, or face being broken up to achieve the justice we need. Whether you are a community member, homeowner, worker or student, we need to come together to challenge corporate power and create an economy and democracy that works for all of us.
Join the 99% for a Week of Actions as We Break Up Bank of America’s Business As Usual!
Week of Action!
Interfaith Activities
Day of Training
Art making
Action Spokes Council
Mon, May 7
Visibility Day with activities in high traffic areas and local banks!
Action Spokes Council
Tues. May 8
Education Day with Press event, poll actions and Alternative Summit!
Final trainings and action spokes council
Wed. May 9
Break Up Business as Usual for Bank of America Shareholders!
On the morning of May 9 at 8 am, people from around the state, country and world will converge on the “Wall Street of the South” to participate in creative, mass non-violent direct action to “Break Up Business As Usual for Bank of America.” Our marches will carry our call for justice to the doors of the Shareholder meeting and surrounding areas. On the day of the Shareholder meeting, people will have the opportunity to engage in a variety of creative educational, cultural, theatrical, visibility, and nonviolent direct action activities.
March Assembly Sites:
Housing Justice Now! Bank of America, N. Tryon @ 9th St.
Stop Funding Coal and the Militarization of Our Communities! The Green, Tryon @ Levine Ave of the Arts
Corporations Out of Politics: Pay Your Taxes Not Your Lobbyists! Old City Hall, Davidson @ 4th St
For more information on housing, how to get involved in organizing for the Bank of America Shareholder’s protest and to RSVP your contingent, visit http://www.ncagainstcorporatepower.org
Edited by Ayuveda (05/03/12 02:46 PM)
_________________________
Sometimes, tear gas can make you see better.
-graffiti in Athens
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#1342412 - 05/03/12 06:13 PM
Re: Occupy May Day
[Re: Chicago Jesus]
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DeadDave
Senior Member
Registered: 01/01/11
Posts: 571
Loc: 6 feet under
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. The taliban look cleaner and are better dressed. The trash cans make the Flea-Baggers look cheap.
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#1342418 - 05/03/12 06:32 PM
Re: Occupy May Day
[Re: Ayuveda]
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twocats
Silver Member
Registered: 02/09/10
Posts: 10778
Loc: NYS
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Ahahahahahaha....who cares. After Obama is voted out in November, these clown will be gone. Sure homie.  Demonstrators march down Broadway during a May Day protest on May 1, 2012 in New York City. Occupy Wall Street demonstrators joined labor groups in a march to protest economic injustice and observe International Labor Day. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Economic Injustice and International Labor Day:
How successful Occupy 2012 will be in keeping the issue of wage inequity atop the political agenda is anyone’s guess. But here’s something to occupy your mind:
Far from the mass demonstrations, machinists at construction giant Caterpillar in Joliet, Ill., have walked off the job. Some 800 of 2,000 employees are represented by Local Lodge 851 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers, which objected to a contract offer that keeps wages flat for six years, raises health care premiums, strips seniority rights and substitutes a 401(k) plan for the company-supported pension plan.
Times are tough -- why don’t those machinists just suck it up? Well, for one thing, Caterpillar is not a company on the ropes: It gave its CEO a 42 percent hike in compensation last year, to $14.8 million. According to one analysis of Caterpillar’s financial picture, the company’s net income rose 83 percent in 2011 to $4.9 billion, while its revenue grew 41 percent to $60.1 billion.
For a company to squeeze employees while it rakes in big profits is unconscionable. It’s the kind of corporate “leadership” that’s making the middle class a vanishing species. And it perfectly illustrates the growing chasm between the 99 percent and the 1 percent: The CEO hauls in a huge raise while workers – who, let us not forget, create the value in the company – get squat.
That’s not a knock on capitalism or a bid for “class warfare.” It’s a simple plea for a more just society – which is what the best of Occupy is all about.
_________________________
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul.
Walt Whitman
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#1342447 - 05/03/12 09:39 PM
Re: Occupy May Day
[Re: Chicago Jesus]
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Rich_Tallcot
Senior Member
Registered: 01/19/03
Posts: 3779
Loc: Union Springs, New York
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Seattle mayor issues emergency order after May Day mayhem
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/05/01/sea.../#ixzz1trPV73H1
They sure got their point across here. Maybe someone on the forum knows what they were protesting - but it does not count unless at least two people on the forum agree because no two people at the protests agree either.
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#1342478 - 05/03/12 11:58 PM
Re: Occupy May Day
[Re: VM Smith]
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Ayuveda
Senior Member
Registered: 04/05/10
Posts: 6367
Loc: Imagine
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We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends Including the part where the revolutionaries kill and rape Christians?
"tactic?"
Are you suggesting that a concerted effort targeting Christians exists among the hundreds of thousands of citizens representing a cross-section of society involved in the revolutionary revolt against the regime?
Christians themselves were and are, one would imagine, well represented among the active supporters, as well as martyrs, of the uprising.
I would expect the same level of involvement from Christians exists in the Occupy movement here as well.
“May Day in New York City was beautiful. From the “99 pickets” protest in the morning targeting corporate headquarters in midtown, to the Bryant Park pop-up occupation, to the Free University in Madison Square Park where students and educators went on strike by holding their classes outside, to the joyous, fair-like atmosphere of Union Square and, finally, with the energetic march with tens of thousands of people, chanting, singing, dancing all the way to Wall Street, the city felt re-imagined and re-invigorated. The entire day was inspiring and powerful.”
As Occupy regroups after May Day protests across the country, our activist experts weigh in on what it achieved
Rinku Sen, Janet Byrne, Tom Hayden, Billy Talen, Hannah Appel and Manissa McCleave Maharawal
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 2 May 2012
Janet Byrne: 'Occupy Wall Street is not a dog-and-pony show anymore'
Janet Byrne
If one were attempting to mummify Occupy Wall Street by reducing it to a greatest hits list of accomplishments, the kinds of questions asked Tuesday by many mainstream news outlets would be a good start:
"What about the street presence? Isn't that Occupy's single greatest strength? Is there anything left if that's gone?"
With the May Day march down Broadway, protesters effectively put an end to any such efforts to Facebook-timeline the movement.
First, the march was too big to allow Occupy Wall Street to continue to be reduced to a dog-and-pony show. Four police officers I spoke with at about 8pm near Trinity Church, at Wall Street and Broadway, estimated the crowd at 25,000, and Occupy Wall Street organizers put it variously at 10,000–15,000 and at 50,000. The office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Affairs at the NYPD explained on the morning of 2 May that the NYPD "does not give out crowd estimates. Ask the organizers." The New York Civil Liberties Union put the number at 30,000.
Second, it included too many factions for Occupy Wall Street to be considered homogeneous anymore. Among the groups chanting "We are the 99%" were the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns, construction worker union LIUNA Local 78, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, and the AFL-CIO.
The movement is proving not to be as instantly archivable as some may have wished. It is a complex organism. It is forming new alliances and severing old ones. Street protest is colorful and quantifiable, but it is by no means the movement's only avenue.
Reverend Billy Talen: 'The future lies in reinventing protest form'
Reverend Billy
Occupy is a new form of protest comprised of ordinary living, strategically placed. It electrified us last fall when, in Liberty Square, we lived simply in the open, fed each other, made our own media and security, created new hand signaling for a start-over democracy.
We had tried to find a new kind of protest for decades – accused so often of recycling protest clichés, the rally and the march, the signs and shouts. Then we found it right in front of us, living life in ordinary terms on islands of public space, all in the shadows of the financial dark lords vacuum-wrapped in their reflective glass.
This proved transfixing theatre. The play had a long run. The police were flummoxed by the invasion of pup tents and pots of soup and crucially sincere discussions.
Finally, in the US, led by uniformed thugs in Oakland and New York City, the first amendment to the US constitution was amended to allow police violence. In a matter of weeks in November, coordinated by terror professionals in Washington, we were ousted from public space. The security state, often financed openly by big banks (in New York, JP Morgan Chase paid $4.6m) – finally figured out our magic. Now what?
Lots of revolutions hide in the camouflage of the population, although that is more identified with Cuba in the 1950s or South Africa in the 1980s or Syria now. Pre-Occupy, how many tens of thousands were there on New York streets? Tuesday, there was a huge May Day show of marching, but it was completely ignored by such papers as the New York Times and New York Daily News, resembling once again a traditional protest. But under sunshine, with so many families, it was an exhilarating hello within our culture. The number of cops and helicopters was almost breathtaking, and added to the reminder that we are a threat to the 1%.
Clearly, the future lies in again inventing a protest form. Our evolution makes the revolution. There are ways to open up the seams of society and once again emerge powerfully, communicating with the larger world in unstoppable ways.
Hannah Appel: 'May Day felt like a celebration of renewed possibilities'
Hannah Appel
May Day started with 99 pickets headed out into the Manhattan drizzle. In front of Citigroup's world headquarters, protesters chanted their critiques through the now-famous people's microphone: $10bn profit in 2010 alone, zero dollars federal taxes for five years running. Elsewhere, an Immigrant Worker Justice Tour led protesters from Wells Fargo to Chipotle, to the Capital Grille, setting up a picket at each to highlight the forms of workplace discrimination particular to immigrant workers. In each of the picket lines, one could see signs of Occupy Wall Street – puppets, the use of the people's microphone – side by side with community organizations (New York Communities for Change, the Immokalee Workers), and unions including the Teamsters Local 814 and the UFCW Local 1500.
In short, May Day 2012 indexed a time of surprising political possibility. Thinking back to the summer of 2011, the intractable political argument in the US was whether or not to raise the debt ceiling. But as Occupy Wall Street burst into downtown Manhattan's privately-owned public spaces, questions of inequality catapulted to the front pages, as did a renewed focus on the financial industry's role in an economic crisis that seemed to pass systemic risk to tax payers and systemic reward to the top.
May Day felt, in many ways, like a celebration of renewed possibilities: critiques of the foreclosure crisis, student debt, or investment banks' ongoing role in the European debt crisis were sharper; coalitions that would've been unimaginable only a few months ago – between immigrant workers and unions, for example – took their first public steps.
The drizzle cleared to sunshine, and a free university unfolded in Madison Square Park with people crowding around teach-ins and discussions. In one – "Weapons of Math Destruction" – a former hedge-fund quantitative analyst, now an organizer with Occupy Wall Street's Alternative Banking group, talked to a growing crowd about the abuse of mathematical modeling in the financial industry. Eventually a "guitarmy" of musicians swept those gathered in Madison Square Park into a march that stopped first to rally in Union Square, and then proceeded down Broadway, where else but to Wall Street, where the movement started nine months ago, and where May Day 2012 ended in an impromptu dance party and public assembly.
Tom Hayden: 'We need a new generation of Robin Hoods'
Tom Hayden
The measure of a genuine uprising, as distinct from a political campaign or mobilization, is the degree of its "newness", in the phrase of the New England Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. By that standard, the broad Occupy movement is a genuinely new force in the world, one which has unhinged "the predictable".
Tuesday, there were hundreds of spirited protests as Occupiers ended their winter. There were protests against Iraq a decade ago, but these are defined by their youthful leadership, courage, and geographic breadth. The tactics in some places deserves discussion. But instead of being critical spectators on the sideline, we all can demand that our leaders not mechanically defend the status quo with police and empty promises.
The Occupy movement, and kindred spirits from the Middle East to China, is driven by young people who feel unrepresented by the institutions, disenfranchised economically, and threatened by an environmental catastrophe.
The direct action movement of the early 1960s was similar in nature. Young black students, lacking the vote and facing a Jim Crow future, became Freedom Riders and occupied segregated lunch counters. Students who could not vote but could be drafted for Vietnam took up resistance. Our elders utterly failed in their duty to nurture the young. Mounting catastrophes were the result, until the Vietnam war was ended, Richard Nixon deposed, and democratic reforms conceded.
Now that we have an African-American president and normal relations with Vietnam, one wonders why the crises of the sixties really were necessary. Power seems to yield only stubbornly, always leaving a trickle of blood to warn against future defiance.
Will today's establishment yield or not? It appears that Merkel's stark vision of austerity is being rejected, that Labour is rising in the UK, that the Socialists may win in Paris. The popular tide is running against privatization and repression, as it has in the US since 2008, where the Tea Party is losing support.
But will new political leaders, benefiting from rage against the City of London and Wall Street, deliver anything of real value, such as a Robin Hood tax? And if not, then what?
This is the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the American New Left. Despite the great democratic reforms our generation did achieve, one mountain remained untouched. The 1962 statement noted that 1% of Americans controlled 80% of all corporate wealth, and that the disparity was changed since the 1920s, despite the Keynesian reforms of the New Deal.
If there is any chance at all that our elected governments can bring the unelected financial oligarchs to heel, it will take a new generation of Robin Hoods, burdened by debt from the modern Crusades, along with feminists and environmentalists (Maid Marions), and a radical spirituality (Friar Tuck). Or a new dark ages will descend.
Manissa McCleave Maharawal: 'These months of planning have changed the Occupy movement'
Manissa McCleave Maharawal
May Day in New York City was beautiful. From the "99 pickets" protest in the morning targeting corporate headquarters in midtown, to the Bryant Park pop-up occupation, to the Free University in Madison Square Park where students and educators went on strike by holding their classes outside, to the joyous, fair-like atmosphere of Union Square and, finally, with the energetic march with tens of thousands of people, chanting, singing, dancing all the way to Wall Street, the city felt re-imagined and re-invigorated. The entire day was inspiring and powerful.
I had been anxious about the day for months, anxious that the multiple-hour-long planning meetings, the outreach strategies, the banner-making parties, the coalition meetings and the coordinating meetings would all be for nothing. Anxious that months and months of planning that went into May Day would have been spent in vain. Anxious that it would rain, that no one would come, that it would be a failure. And while it rained a little, the day was a huge success with tens of thousands of people on the streets standing and acting together.
These months of planning have changed the Occupy movement. Through alliance-building and working with unions, community groups, immigrant rights groups and the burgeoning student movement, Occupy has had to learn from the longer history of organizing and activism in New York. It has had to learn what it means to listen to groups and people from diverse places and with diverse experiences and to work with them. It has had to understand itself better through this listening, and it has had to convince other groups that it is a serious movement, not just some kids who camped in a park for a few months.
The success and beauty of Tuesday was a testament to how important these alliances and this work have been. But it was also a testament to the ways that we must understand, as we chanted on the streets, that all our grievances are connected. The lesson of May Day is that we are powerful when we do more than just say this, but when we enact it in our activism.
Rinku Sen: 'We can smile our way through the fights we pick, but pick them we must'
Rinku Sen
Someone asked me recently what was the best way to convince administrators to address racial inequities with systemic changes on her college campus. How can we convince the powers that be to change their ways? Embedded in that question was an abiding assumption that the people who already enjoy positional power must agree with an idea in order to implement it.
While many people running key institutions are doing their best to close racial, economic and gender gaps across the world, in my experience, there are many more whose chief concern is maintaining the status quo. If "convincing" such leaders to do the right thing only required presenting compelling evidence, then we could make all sorts of change simply by producing research reports and hosting conversations.
And that's why I love May Day. The protests tie us to a tradition of righteous collective action, and remind us that profound changes require actual fighting; that not everything can be achieved through consensus; and that the pathway to change is in building and channeling the power of the people who need the change. It's not about convincing the recalcitrant or the blind, nor about asking nicely. The project of progressive social change requires aggregating enough power to make a demand and have it stick.
The original May Day took place in the middle of a 50-year struggle to establish the eight-hour workday. The titans of industry resisted violently, not just because the new rule would cut into their profits, but also because it opened the door to regulation in general. Many of our current agenda items will require similar timelines because they will, in fact, reduce the money and power that elites have.
Today's elites aren't going to give up those assets any more easily than yesterday's. Racial, economic, and gender justice are all possible to achieve. An optimistic tone and solutions orientation take us a long way in recruiting allies. We can smile our way through the fights we pick, but pick them we must.
_________________________
Sometimes, tear gas can make you see better.
-graffiti in Athens
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Moderator: FL1 Staff, FL1 Mod, FL1 Tek Deluxe, FL1 Mod 2, FL1 Office, FL1 Mod 3
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